It's very interesting to see the hyperbole -- perhaps it's an indication of the supposed failure of your (American, that is) education system. The central theses that school choice works; independent schools are LESS EXPENSIVE than public schools; and, unions/teachers are the problem just don't fly when you compare apples to apples.

There certainly are problems with your (American) educational outcomes but that might be more of a reflection on the socio-economic disparities that exists in your society than of any particular successes or failures of the education systems. The video focussed on two states that are not exactly known for being either socially progressive states or wealthy states. Why do I get the feeling this piece belongs on Fox? (although, there they'd have public schools being run by the devil himself ;-).

In Ontario (and, I'm sure the same applies in many other jurisdictions) independent schools tend to have better outcomes than public schools... because... those who send their kids to independent schools have a higher socio-economic status (SES), and SES is highly correlated with educational success.

Most of the best performing countries have monopolies on public education (which this video conveniently neglected to mention... Belgium is not exactly well known in international circles). My own experiences are in Ontario and Britain. Ontario has a public school monopoly. Our students score well on the standardized international tests, and, when adjusted for socio-economic status, OUTPERFORM the few independent schools that charge $20K-$25K CAD/year in tuition. Britain has charter schools alongside their public schools -- their educational outcomes are much weaker than Ontario's (they are actively copying Ontario's model). Ontario has a strong union with similar restrictions to those discussed in this video. By-and-large we have a reasonable set of teachers with reasonable outcomes and teachers have had fairly good success at advocating for effective investment in education -- in Britain, there are three unions and the teaching staff is thoroughly demoralised (they're having to recruit from abroad because locals don't want to teach in their schools).

And, finally, Ontario spend approximately $5000-6000 CAD (~$4500-5500 USD in 2007 dollars) per student, A FRACTION (1/4) of what tuition is at a comparable (or even sub-par) independent school (they're private, but not-for-profit... the for-profits are utterly atrocious in Ontario).

A few final random thoughts...
* it would help if they used more than a sample size of n=1 for their testing comparison
* comparisons of educational outcome should be adjusted for socio-economic status. If you're comparing Kansas or South Carolina, you need to find some developing nations against which to compare results to make it a "fair test" (some of your science students may be able to explain the notion of a "fair test" to you ;-). Likewise, if you're doing within- or between-state standardised testing, you need to make sure you're not comparing wealthy neighbourhoods with disenfranchised/poor ones. That's always a good subterfuge for the "reformers" since they make these grandiose claims of inadequate schools while bolstering their argument(s) with deception.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no great fan of teacher unions or of failures in school leadership or teaching, but I'm equally no fan of sensationalist and downright disingenuous reporting [1].

[1] In this case I suspect they knew that they were conveniently hiding or even consciously misrepresenting reality and comparing apples to cumquats (or, they could simply have been incompetent which wouldn't be surprising either).